Joe Rogan and Adam Curry Talk About the Early Days of the Internet

My first computer was the Sinclair ZX80. Sinclair ZX80, I've never even heard of it. And I built my own modem, which was, I think, basically like, I don't know, five baud, I guess, to commu- it was an ac- acoustic modem. Wow. You know, so we basically ripped open a phone, put the two pieces in boxes, and then put another hand site on top. Here Jamie's got it. That's it, man. Yeah, that's it. Wow. And then at five baud, I remember when they switched from 14.4. That was way before the- and then my dad always had computers around the house, and I was online on very early in. That's amazing. Look at that thing. So I was hacking with that stuff. Wow. And then you know, the Trash80, you know, TRS100, which was kind of a laptop on batteries, VIC-20, Commodore 64. So when this first started happening, and you started going on Usenet, and you started getting a taste of the internet, like, my experience was AOL. I got a- I picked up an Apple home computer from one of them office stores, whatever the chain was. I don't even think they're around anymore. It was like, it was actually- oh, CompUSA. Oh yeah. That's what it was. Remember that? That's what it was. Of course. Of course. So- The computer super store. Yeah. My friend Robbie used to actually make computers or sell computers for a living, so he was telling me what to get. And I somehow or another connected to AOL. And then I remember going- the first thing I did was go and try to find UFO files. That's always trying to find like, what are the government's files on UFOs? I want to read whatever the fuck you can read. I want to, you know, I want to know what they know. I was downloading all this shit from these like crude AOL boards and like these online searches where you get online search things. And you just- Archie. Yeah. You would get all the paperwork. Remember Archie? The search engine Archie? And then you had Veronica. They would search different types of servers. Remember Gopher? Did you ever get into Gopher? Gopher, I don't remember either. That was- so check this out. Jamie does. Jamie's not. So Gopher was basically the world wide web, only there was no web. And so you could log onto a terminal and you could use a menu system, so basically with the arrow keys, but you go to the right and you might be connecting to a different computer or a different university, i.e. a different server. And then you could have a- so it was basically all these information documents linking to each other. And I started one, I registered MTV.com, which was- Wow. And I went to him and said, hey, I want to- I do this thing on the internet where a lot of our audience is and I want to register MTV.com. Yeah, that's cool. Don't worry about it. We have the AOL keywords, so you go ahead and do your little internet thing there, son. Do whatever you want. We have the AOL keywords. It's literally what they say. We're locked up, bro. We got the internet figured out. So I had this- and I'm promoting it on air. Go to MTV.com for my Gopher server. It was wild. You could do shit then at MTV. And in fact, at first I got an email from the University of Michigan, the Gophers, is that their symbol? I don't know. Michigan? Minnesota. You Michigan? Minnesota. Minnesota. Oh my God. Thank you. And they said, dude, you're using this commercially, you have to pay us $5,000 for a license. I'm like, just for the server software, which is open free, but something in the license said, I'm doing this just on my own. They don't give a fuck. I'm just doing this. I don't have $5,000. Really? I don't have $5,000. I said, if you send me a t-shirt, I'll wear it on MTV. And I said, okay. And I said, I might have a document. You can see there's a video on YouTube of me with the Gopher t-shirt on MTV. And then we're like, oh man, good. That's awesome. Cool. So anyway, then- That's cool on them too. I got this set up and I got an email from this guy in Champaign, Urbana, Illinois. And he's like, hey Adam, see what you're doing with MTV.com. Look I got this thing that I've created, this mosaic browser. And can you install the server, HTTP 1.4 or whatever. And that was Mark Andresen, the guy who went on to create Netscape. Wow. And it was now one of the biggest VC in Silicon Valley. And when I saw that, I said, oh shit, this is like graphic, like a webpage. Remember we used to, images would take a long time to load. Oh yeah. First it would be black and white, progressively loading and it would become color. Like a porn picture. Took an hour to download. Just like bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Yeah. I remember the first time a friend sent me a porn video. He was like, look at this. I was like, what? They can send a video now? What was it? Do you remember what it was? It was a girl giving a guy a blowjob. Okay. And it only lasted like 15 seconds. And it took you two hours to download. Forever. Forever to download. Remember, on using it, you would download from 15 different things and you'd get like all these different files and you had a program that put it back together. Yeah. That's crazy shit. When you remembered the birth of the internet, when you remember first getting on and seeing the expansion, was there ever a moment, when was the moment, I should say, obviously now, today, we all realize it's out of control and it's just wild. So it's a very strange thing that's taking over our lives. And then I want to talk about Neuralink too. I'm sure you know something about that, about Elon Musk's invention, Neuralink. I know a little bit about it. But when you saw it kind of getting away, like when was the moment where you were like, this is a very strange thing that's never happened to people before? Well, I had the online part figured out because I ran a bulletin board. You might remember those. You could call in maybe like five lines and you go in and do your business and then get out. What year is that? Oh, this has got to be early 80s. No, maybe even late 70s. So there's time for innovation there, right? There's big, long stretches where things don't get any better. Well, the speeds got marginally better. People got more phone lines that the computers were able to do more. Then there are also some other things happening. We had Windows, Windows 95 came into play. So now people were in a different world of computing. It used to be DOS and people have WordPerfect and then all of a sudden we have an interface on top of it. We didn't have that. So that starts to teach people how to deal with the environment. So that was all there, but the internet itself would be 1987 and I logged in. To get on the internet, you had to log in to a dial-up account, launch a PPP session or slip, and then you had to launch the software on your computer and then you could open a terminal and you could type things like Telnet and then a domain name or even an IP address. You could connect to someone else's thing and kind of look around. It was just all text-based. But that for me was like, holy shit, you can connect from one to the next. I understood the hyperlinking. I understood how powerful that would be. And if I just had a little computer today on my desk, I had a Mac Plus with a gigantic external 20 megabyte SCSI hard drive. Twenty megabytes. That's an empty Word doc. So that big thing like that. I just knew it was like, oh my God, this is going to be it. The second moment was the Andreessen with his HDPD mosaic browser, the web. And then the third moment was Carl Jacob. I think he's an investor maybe even on the board at Facebook, but he worked at Sun Microsystems at the time. And he contacted me and said, okay, I see what you're doing. I'm going to send you a computer. He sent me a Sun Voyager, which is like a portable, a luggable with an LCD color screen. This is now 88, something like that. It was Unix, which is even crazier. So he started to show me stuff and he actually streamed a song from his workstation in San Francisco to my computer in Montclair, New Jersey. And it played. I had him on the phone here. I heard him start it. And then it came through and it played on my computer. I'd never seen this before or heard it. I was like, oh fuck, broadcast. We can use this to broadcast. And since that moment, I think that's the mission I've been on. And look at, mama, I have arrived. Here we are. That's an amazing story, man. That's cool as fuck. I love hearing it from someone who was there from the very first steps. And you're- I have the Yellow Pages, the Internet Yellow Pages, which was a book. I still have it. It was published. I remember that. It was published. I remember. You can look up everything in the Yellow Pages. That was a business. That's hilarious. That was a business. But Yellow Pages got fucked, right? Of course. That shit fell apart. That business. Here's what happened with newspapers. Here's where the newspapers fucked up with the news when the Internet came around. And there were, I saw it, other people saw it, Craig Newmark saw it. And it's classified. Because they were all hoity-toity about their advertising model. But people- they were really making the money off the classified ads. Everybody knows it. Everybody knew it. And that's what Craig's list, who tried to sell it to Tribune, was it Tribune? Or Hearst? Maybe it was Hearst. For just a couple million bucks. And it's like, no, we're not interested. We don't need it. Not invented here. Whatever. And so he ate up their classified business overnight. And they were left holding the bag saying, well, we have cool news to advertise on. Well, no, no, we'll put some in there. But now it was about the classifieds. That's where the money came from. Wow. Dvorak can tell the story. I'll ask him to do it on the show. You can tell the story about Craig Newmark and how they passed on it. He does that very well. The classified ads, do they even have them? No. Still in the newspapers? They're gone? Obits. Dead people is still a good business. Of course they have some, but no, not really. How often do you hold a physical newspaper in your hand and read it? Whenever I'm at the airport, I always buy the newspapers. Yeah. Because I don't want to be on my phone. Right. Let me just read the newspaper.